Hey Dave when you get a chance willyou wander over to Frankenstein Gov and read my piece on the zombie stock market. I trust your knowledge far more than my own...just check the piece for accuracy..thanks.

I love that Peyton comes. He will come motivated. NFL owners can be real pricks.

Couple of nuances you should change. 1) Primary dealers are the designated market-makers of Government debt. They are also designated trading counter-parties of the Fed.

2) Money is created (printed) when the Fed uses its balance sheet to buy Treasuries and hold them through the PD's. In this case, the Fed prints money and buys the Treasuries, increasing the size of its balance sheet. This is different than a Repo transaction, in which the money is "sterilized" because the Fed doesn't print up extra and the Treasury is used a "collateral" to borrow the money. In Europe, the LTRO "repos" are becoming more like a surrogate for printed money because the maturity is 3 years.3) Here's a nuance most don't realize about injecting funds into the system. And it's more powerful than outright QE because it's not acknowledged as printing, per se. The Fed decreases its reserve requirements for banks - all banks - thereby INCREASING the leverage of bank balance sheets. This means banks can borrow MORE money from the Fed against less equity. This was done in a big way in 2004. The reserve ratio at banks went from like 10:1 to nearly 40:1. That's what all the b.s. about level 1, 2 and 3 assets was about. It was a bullshit way to enable banks to borrow more money from the Fed. This has flooded the system with liquidity that's considered "printed" money or QE.

And you are right, all this liquidity has flooded into the stock market. In fact, as money has flowed OUT of the housing stock, it has shifted in a big way into stocks and Treasuries. We have a big bubble in Treasuries and brewing bubble in stocks.

Grant agrees with the odd premise that they do not but then goes on towhat would be sounder policy. "Why not issue bonds backed by goldbullion? Gold is a better money and is grounded in something besidesthe power of the people that print the dollar bills."

In an unhampered market risk-free profits that may occur from time to time are ephemeral and therefore inconsequential. Hawk-eyed speculators immediately take advantage of them with the result that any further opportunity to make risk-free profits is eliminated on the spot. This is no longer true if the opportunity to make risk-free profit is not an infrequent aberration but the consequence of deliberate and well-advertised official policy as it is in the case of the policy of open market operations. When the central bank relies on open market purchases of government bonds in order to augment the monetary base on a regular, ongoing basis, then speculators can anticipate and pre-empt it. This policy, whole-heartedly supported by Keynesian/Friedmanite economics, is the most ill-conceived monetary policy ever concocted for the purpose of increasing the stock of money. The Federal Reserve Act of 1913, for excellent reasons, disallowed such a policy and imposed stiff and progressive penalties for non-compliance on the Federal Reserve banks if their balance sheet showed that government bonds had been used to cover Federal Reserve note or deposit liabilities. At first the Fed used open market operations illegally. It could get away with it because of the connivance of the Treasury in ‘forgetting’ to collect the penalty. The conspiracy created a fait accompli and, in the end, Congress was forced to legalize the corrosive practice retroactively in 1935 when it amended the Federal Reserve Act.

The newly invented monetary policy of open market operations is responsible for much of the deflationary damage inflicted on the world economy during the Great Depression of the 1930’s. It started an avalanche of falling interest rates that soon went out of control. Falling interest rates destroy capital as they increase the burden of debt contracted earlier at higher rates. Perfectly sound businesses fail if their debt burden, through no fault of theirs, exceeds the profitability of deployed capital. The whole process was most insidious. Entrepreneurs did not know what hit them. From one day to the next they found themselves uncompetitive as competitors financed their business at lower rates. They had to lay off their employees. They went bankrupt in droves. Wanton destruction of capital was the main cause of deflation and the Great Depression in the 1930’s.

If everyone (big and small) took their medicine, we'd be into an organic recovery already....

The Age of Double Standards

Robert KuttnerMarch 19, 2012American Airlines can declare bankruptcy and wipe away debt. But you can’t—and that’s just the beginning.

Petty felons and 200,000 small-time drug users do prison time, while corporate criminals whose frauds cost the rest of the economy trillions of dollars are permitted to settle civil suits for small fines, with shareholders bearing the expenses. Ordinary families pay tax at a higher rate than billionaires. When fracking contaminates a property and makes a home uninhabitable, the homeowner rather than the natural-gas company suffers the loss. The mother of all double standards is taxpayer aid and Federal Reserve advances—running into the trillions of dollars—that went to the banks that caused the collapse, while the bankers avoided prosecution, and the rest of the society got to eat austerity.

Linking all of these disparities between citizens and corporations is the political power of a new American plutocracy. Until our politics connects these dots and citizens start resisting, the financial elite will rule. Despite the Occupy movement, most regular people have yet to experience the sudden enlightenment of Captain Yossarian, who decided, unpatriotically, that he didn’t want to die. In the face of economic pillaging, we are behaving like damned fools.

Eric Arthur Blair aka George Orwell

"Hope" is not a valid investment strategy

Full Time Jobs Over Last 5 Years

Is Your Gold Missing?

Why Gold?

Gold is the world's oldest currency. You exchange your fiat currency (dollars, euros, yen, yuan) into gold as an insurance policy against catastrophic Central Bank and Government policies which serve to destroy the value of fiat currencies and destroy democracy.

Gold can ONLY be considered an investment to the extent that it remains significantly and historically undervalued in relation to the fiat currencies against which its value is measured. Otherwise it remains the world's oldest currency and is completely free from the counterparty risk associated with currency by Government fiat (i.e. fiat currencies rely on a Government's "full faith and credit.")

Epic Quote - "Jesse" Sent This To Me

"The world will soon wake up to the reality that everyone is broke and can collect nothing from the bankrupt, who are owed unlimited amounts by the insolvent, who are attempting to make late payments on a bank holiday in the wrong country, with an unacceptable currency, against defaulted collateral, of which nobody is sure who holds title." - Anonymous

The Basic Fundamental Problem

What's the solution?

“THERE IS NO MEANS OF AVOIDING THE FINAL COLLAPSE OF A BOOM BROUGHT ABOUT BY CREDIT EXPANSION. THE ALTERNATIVE IS ONLY WHETHER THE CRISIS SHOULD COME SOONER AS THE RESULT OF A VOLUNTARY ABANDONMENT OF FURTHER CREDIT EXPANSION OR LATER AS A FINAL AND TOTAL CATASTROPHE OF THE CURRENCY SYSTEM INVOLVED.”

Ludwig von Mises – Austrian Economist (1881- 1973)

Quote Of The Month Courtesy of "Jesse"

Unfortunately for Larry Summers, Ben Bernanke, and their friends at the BIS, they have not yet figured out how to print physical gold, silver, and other essential commodities, and the world is reaching the point where it might simply start ignoring the New York based markets with respect to essential commodities such as basic materials, oil, foodstuffs, and the like, as they become increasingly irrelevant, fraudulent, and Orwellian. And then where will the financial engineers be, except with no more excuses and no place to hide?

Great Quote From Jim Rogers On Govt CPI Reporting

JR: I mean, we have inflation now. If you go to the shop, whether it’s groceries, or education or insurance or health care, prices are going up for everything. The government lies about it in the US. Some countries lie, many countries don’t: Australia, China, India and Norway. Many countries don’t lie about it and acknowledge that we have inflation. Others lie about it, the UK and the US, but if you go shopping you know prices are up.

Q: Are you saying that the American Consumer Price Index (CPI) published by the US Bureau of Labor Statistics is a lie? JR: In my opinion, yes, of course it is. Have you looked at it? They’ve changed their accounting several times in the past few decades. When housing was 20% to 25% of the CPI and housing was going up, they didn’t count it, saying rents weren’t going up, and then when home prices started going down, they counted it. It’s the same with many things. It’s staggering some of the tortuous reasoning that the BLS has used over the past 25 or 30 years. When the price of gasoline goes up, they say it’s not really going up because it’s better gasoline, better quality, therefore you’re getting more for your money. I mean, it’s endless, the stuff that they say and for some reason people sit there, although more and more people are catching on, and accept what the government says.

Priceless Quote From Richard Russell

On Larry Summers: This doofus practically ruined Harvard when he headed it. I can't think of a worse choice to be chief economic advisor. I wouldn't trust Summers to manage a Starbucks franchise.

Quote of the Week

"The primary function of a Central Bank is to engage in the massive transfer of wealth from the middle class to the wealthy elite. The Federal Reserve was set up to do this with the blessing and support of Congress." - Dave in Denver

If you refuse to believe the above, please read "The Creature From Jekyll Island: A Second Look at the Federal Reserve" by G. Edward Griffin and then explain to me why the Senate voted down the Vitter Amendment and Congress refuses to pass a law requiring a full audit of the Fed, even though the Fed is using taxpayer-backed money to bailout Wall Street and Europe.

Quote of the Month

And very relevant in the context of yesterday's post about gold moving higher against all fiat currencies:

Just imagine what would happen if a mere ten percent of the money currently going into bonds were instead to go into gold. As in 1972, the real move has yet to begin.

- Murray Pollit, Pollit & Co.

A Picture Says It All...

www.moneyandmarkets.com

Golden ore samples produced by Eurasian Minerals

Undisclosed exploration site

The Next Reserve Currency?

1 oz. Chinese Panda

Guess who said this?

Rising prices of precious metals and other commodities are an indication of a very early stage of an endeavor to move away from paper currencies...What is fascinating is the extent to which gold still holds reign over the financial system as the ultimate source of payment.

-Alan Greenspan, 9 Sep 2009

THIS is what REAL money looks like

1 oz. Gold Eagles

Alan Greenspan said what?

“Deficit spending is simply a scheme for the ‘hidden’ confiscation of wealth. Gold stands in the way of this insidious process. It stands as a protector of property rights.”

From "Gold and Economic Freedom" a 1966 Essay by Alan Greenspan

About Me

I spent many years working in various analytic jobs and trading on Wall Street. For nine of those years, I traded junk bonds for a large bank. I have an MBA from the University of Chicago, with a concentration in accounting and finance.
Currently I co-manage a precious metals and mining stock investment fund in Denver.
My goal is to help people understand and analyze what is really going on in our financial system and economy.